Pages

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

The Blu-ray release of the gorgeous Criterion discs ofChildren
of ParadiseandUmberto
D.highlight the end of one era and the
beginning of another in European movies. Marcel Carné’sChildren
of Paradise (Les enfants du paradis), with a screenplay by Carné’s favorite
collaborator, the poet Jacques Prévert, came out just as the Second World War
was ending, and considering the restraints under which French filmmaking was
confined – political, esthetic and financial – during the Occupation, it seems
remarkable that these two men could have come up with a movie so lush and with
such a broad narrative sweep. (It took two years to make.)Children
of Paradiseis a three-hour-and-ten-minute
historical melodrama set in the Paris
theatrical world of the 1820s and its subject is the line, easily blurred,
between art and life. Carné’s bailiwick was theromantic-fatalistic
vein of French movies in the 1930s, and though other directors worked it too –
Julien Duvivier inPépéle
Mokoand even occasionally Jean Renoir
(especially inLa bête humaine) – Carnéwas
its undisputed master. That’s Carné’sPort of
Shadowswe see being unspooled in the movie
house in the Dunkirk sequence ofAtonement,
while James McAvoy is wandering around behind the screen in a fever: Joe
Wright, the director, is playing carefully against the romanticism of Carné’s
movie, with its moody, doomed hero, to suggest that this kind of gesture is
gone forever, that in the world of Dunkirk it’s become a mockery. Carnéand
Prévert reached the height of this irresistible style and mood inDaybreak
(Le jour se lève), which came out just before the war. (Jean Gabin, the
poster child for this genre, was the leading man in all four of these movies.)Children
of Paradise, which has the good sense to slip it into a faraway historical
period, is its last gasp.

Pierre Brasseur and Arletty in Children of Paradise

But though the movie definitely has its swoony side and centers on an
ill-fated love affair, it’s too complex and too remarkable an achievement to be
categorized so easily. Few films in history have provided so fascinating a
glimpse of a theatrical era. All but one of the principal characters are
performers, and three of them are based on historical figures. Jean-Louis
Barrault, he of the sad eyes and bony, drooping face, plays Baptiste (inspired
by Jean-Gaspard Deburau), the gifted mime who elevates the status of his
father’s populist boulevard theatre, Les Funambules. Pierre Brasseur plays
Frédérick Lemaître, the sensualist who becomes an actor by accident and a star
by natural right; in the movie’s second half, he and Baptiste are the two most
famous actors in Paris,
performing in rival companies – Baptiste in poetically conceived mime pieces,
Lemaître in newly minted vehicles as well as in Shakespeare. (We get to see him
briefly as Othello, as well as in a scene from a play that he disdains so much
that he sends it up, to the aggravation of the playwrights and the delight of
his audience.) Marcel Herrand is Pierre-François Lacenaire, a thief and
murderer with a highly evolved wit and a love of the theatre. Prévert wrote all
three of these characters, but especially Baptiste and Lacenaire, as
embodiments of the playwriting of the Romantic age
that produced their real-life counterparts. Romantic drama is full of
flamboyant outlaws like Lacenaire, and it’s built on stories of the love that
can’t survive yet never dies, such as the passion of Baptiste and Garance
(Arletty, one of the most exquisite beauties who ever mesmerized a camera). At
the beginning of the movie, Garance is a sideshow attraction who sits nude in a
bath, with only her statuesque head and shoulders visible, admiring her own
reflection in a hand mirror as gentlemen pay to walk inside the tent and gape
at her. She isn’t really an actress, but she’s so magnificent a creature that
she graduates to a featured role at Les Funambules. Baptiste
falls in love with her but, because he’s too shy to act on his desire, she
winds up in bed with Lemaître. Only much later, after Baptiste has married his
co-star Nathalie (Maria Casarès), who worships him, and Garance has become the
mistress of a count (Louis Salou) who has saved her from prison but whom she
doesn’t pretend to love, does she come to realize that it’s Baptiste who holds
the key to her heart. And by then it’s too late.

Especially if you seeChildren of
Paradisewhen you’re young enough – I encountered it
first in college, which is, I believe, the ideal time – you’re unlikely to
forget the scene where Baptiste, playing a scene with Nathalie, becomes so
distracted by the sight of Garance with Lemaître in the wings that he forgets
he’s on stage, and Nathalie, instantly understanding how he feels about
Garance, breaks theatrical convention and intones his name in a horrified stage
whisper. And the film ends with one of the great final shots in world cinema,
where Garance says a final farewell to Baptiste and literally disappears in a
crowd of carnival merrymakers as Baptiste struggles vainly to follow her
through the boulevard. This image represents the apotheosis of French studio moviemaking
in what’s known as thecinéma de papaperiod,
which came between the golden age of French filmmaking in the thirties and the
French New Wave at the end of the fifties. The French directors of the thirties
had, like their Impressionist forebears, ventured out of the studio and intoplein
air; movies like Renoir’sBoudu Saved
from Drowningand his impeccable short filmA
Day in the Countrycapture the
look and feel of Paris
and the countryside, respectively, in a glorious epoch that the Occupation cut
off unceremoniously. And audiences wouldn’t see the real thing again until
Truffaut and Godard sallied forth into the heart of Paris to shootThe
400 Blowsand Breathless. In between French
filmmaking was locked in the studio, just as Hollywood
filmmaking had been in the thirties (and continued to be until the post-war
film noirs took advantage of the new shutter speeds and made shooting outside
at night a viable alternative).Children of
Paradiseshows how lyrical and sophisticated
movies could get that were arrived at by such artificial means.

What Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini were up to in Italy at the
same time couldn’t have been more different. As the war came to an end, they
invented neo-realism, which set stories of contemporary life against the social
and economic realities of a struggling, bankrupt Italy. They were the Stendhals of
their time – especially De Sica, who collaborated with the novelist and
screenwriter Cesare Zavattini on four of the greatest movies ever to come out
of Italy:Shoeshine(1946), The Bicycle Thief (1948), Miracle
in Milan(1951) andUmberto
D.(1952). The third of these was a satirical
fantasy; the other three, like their first (neglected) foray into neo-realism,
1942’sThe Children Are Watching Us, were
startlingly authentic and profoundly affecting reinterpretations of the realist
project. De Sica cast (mostly) non-actors whose faces seemed right to him for
the roles Zavattini had penned and whom, with his gift for acting out dramatic
situations, he could coach into giving flawless, unactorish performances. Carlo
Battisti, who plays Umberto, the poverty-stricken pensioner wandering the
streets of Rome with his beloved dog Flag, was a university professor in real
life; Maria Pia Casilio, who plays Maria, the maid in his building and his only
friend, was a fifteen-year-old from the provinces who showed up at a local
audition with a friend, out of curiosity to see what real actresses looked
like. She’d never been to a movie in her life and she had no idea who De Sica
was. (Casilio recounts the whole story in a charming interview that’s one of
the extras on the Criterion disc.)

If the idea of realism is that it produces a surface so detailed and so
convincing that we can look through it as through glass and perceive a
universal truth, then no one has ever surpassedUmberto
D.in achieving that end. (Others have done as
well, though: Renoir before De Sica and, in India, Satyajit
Ray after him.) And no one has ever made a movie about the sorrows of old age
as great as this one. The movie opens with a protest of old men over the
inadequacy of their pension, and they’re a sad sight indeed; the cops disperse
them because they don’t have a permit. De Sica moves from the general to the
specific, introducing us to his protagonist, Umberto D. Ferrari. (De Sica calls
him “Umberto D.” as if he were a case study – a nod, perhaps, to Zola and the
naturalists.) Umberto’s pension is $25 a month and his landlady, Elena (Lina
Gennari), charges him $17, so he owes her money, and she threatens to evict
him. (She wants him gone; he’s in the way – she can get more for the room if
she gets rid of him.) He tries to sell his watch to a man he meets at the
protest, who isn’t interested, and since Umberto is a proud man, the moment is
an embarrassing one. He breaks the rules, sneaking food to his dog under the
table at the cafeteria where he cadges a cheap meal, taking Flag on the
streetcar, asking the sympathetic nurse at the hospital, where he gets himself
admitted for a bad cough, for a rosary to earn him points with her and an extra
day or two on the ward, where he can be fed and taken care of. These actions
are human, understandable; he’s just trying to live his life in the most
dignified way he knows. De Sica doesn’t try to make a hero out of Umberto or
romanticize his troubles. We love him because he’s human, a decent man trying
to wend his way through a difficult life; we love him because of what he goes
through, which makes us feel close to him; we love him because we know we couldbethis
man. Umberto is a man of the old school: when he sees a man stop to beg on
the street, he’s a little shocked at his forwardness and his lack of shame.
He’s shocked to find that Elena is renting out rooms (including his own, behind
his back) to couples who want a place for sex. When Maria tells him he’s
pregnant, he replies, amazed, “And you say it like that?” “How should I say
it?’ she answers. She’s from a different generation (and a different
background); for him pregnancy out of wedlock isn’t
news that you just announce, without embarrassment.

Maria Pia Casilio and Carlo Battisti in Umberto D.

The movie is staggering from start to finish, but three sequences stand out.
The first, which contains no dialogue, is a classic piece of neorealist
filmmaking. All that happens in it is that Maria gets up out of bed, lights the
stove, looks out the window onto the crowded tenement neighborhood, boils the
water and grinds the beans for coffee, examines her stomach for early signs of
her pregnancy, closes the door with her foot for a little privacy and then
cries silently. It’s a textbook example of how De Sica’s technique works: he
weds extreme naturalism (very precise realist details) with lyricism, which
comes from the delicacy of the camerawork, the beauty of Casilio’s mandarin
face, and the emotion that undergirds the scene and emerges, oh so gently, at
the end. You feel that you’ve been drawn straight into this young woman’s most
intimate thoughts and feelings, and yet because De Sica is so subtle and so
respectful of the character – as he is of Umberto – you don’t feel he’s
violated the character in any way in opening her up to us.

The second of these sequences begins with Umberto seeing a second man
begging aggressively in the street. He runs into an old friend and tries to
touch him for a loan, but the friend doesn’t bite. So Umberto tries begging
himself, but he can’t do it: it takes all his resolution to open his palm, and
when a passerby stops and reaches into his pocket for some change, Umberto,
overcome with shame, flips his hand so that it looks as if he’s testing for
rain. Then he coaxes Flag to stand on his hind legs with his master’s fedora in
his mouth while he hides behind a pillar and watches. The scene breaks your
heart. It mends just in time to get broken again when Umberto, having reached
the end of his tether, decides to throw himself in front of a train with Flag
clutched to his chest (he’s tried and failed to find a good home for the dog;
he can’t stand the idea of leaving him to starve in the Roman streets) – but
the dog, sensing danger squeals and wriggles out of his arms. This scene
undergoes a masterly shift in tone that Fellini must have loved: he reproduced
it, in his own style, at the end ofhismasterpiece,Nights
of Cabiria, half a decade later.

Neo-realism came back into fashion, in both Italy
and France,
in the nineties, and there are still filmmakers, like Luc and Jean-Pierre
Dardenne, who think that these are the movies they’re making. But they miss the
point, which De Sica articulates in a documentary calledThat’s
Life!, made for Italian television, that also shows up on the Criterion
disc (and is indispensable for De Sica aficionados). Neo-realism, he explains,
is “an altered reality. It’s a transposition on a lyric, poetic level, on a
higher level. It must never be reality! Reality is the banality of current
events.” No realist was ever less banal than Vittorio De Sica.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts
and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts,
where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review, The
Boston Phoenix and is the author of three books: Method
Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No
Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in
American Movies.